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Valuing the linguistic wealth of a society and recognizing that foreign language proficiency is not only symbolic capital but also material capital that serves economic growth is sine qua non in today’s global economy. English is simply not enough. UK companies are losing millions of pounds annually by insisting on monolingual entrepreneurship. According to the results of a large scale European survey on young people’s foreign language competencies, the English are the worse among Europeans in foreign language learning. Americans are equally if not more incompetent in languages. Only 20% of the American people can communicate in another language, whereas 80% of the Europeans have basic proficiency in one or even two foreign languages. The English speakers’ foreign language deficit is becoming an important economic barrier in a highly competitive, tightly interconnected world. This is beginning to really become evident to those concerned and this is the reason that the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has recently formed a national commission to examine the current state of language education and conduct the first national study on foreign language learning in more than 30 years. A look into what Europe has been doing for the promotion and development of multilingual and plurilingual competences in the last 15 years may be enlightening. This talk will present a significant array of good practices that could prove useful in the American context.